Wireless communication systems have evolved from systems dedicated to carrying voice communications, to third generation (3G) systems that are configured to support high data rates. As such, wireless communication systems are increasingly being used for distribution of data and information. The data and information distributed across wireless communication systems are often contained within large data files. Wireless communication systems, such as cellular telephone systems, have evolved to handle the large amounts of data being transmitted over the system. Wireless communication devices are often configured with the ability to send or receive data files. The data files may include ring tone files and picture files.
However, even in 3G systems, efficient transmission of the data and information over the wireless system is a priority because wireless communication systems are often constrained to operate within a fixed bandwidth or frequency spectrum allocated by governing bodies.
For example, with the rapid growing 3G wireless services, digital camera phones become increasingly popular in our daily life. People can exchange digital images instantly across the advanced 3G wireless networks. However, due to the tremendous data amount of each image, wireless carriers typically impose a file size limit to each compressed image, for example 100 KB, for efficient usage of the precious wireless bandwidth. A digital camera can easily capture an image that exceeds the constraints imposed by a service provider. Therefore, before a handset sends a picture over the wireless networks, it may have to ensure the picture file size is not over the limit enforced by the wireless carriers.
A device, such as a wireless handset, may incorporate file compression in order to help conform to the file size limitations imposed by system providers. However, file compression and the resultant compression ratio can depend on the contents of the file. Two files of the exact same initial size may produce different compressed file sizes, due to the sensitivity of an encoding algorithm to file contents. Therefore, it is desirable to have a file encoding technique that is able to consistently produce a compressed file size and that is relatively insensitive to file contents or original file size.